This drabble was inspired by a wonderful story on Archiveofourown (another fanfiction site, if you are unaware of it) called Redo, by Master_Procrastonator. Its a time travel fic where poor Kuroko is stuck in a time loop. If you enjoyed this, I totally recommend taking the time to search it up and read. I'm much too lazy to turn this into an entire fic, sorry I'm like this.
Please send the author some love too!
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Somewhere out there, a Kuroko Tetsuya wakes up the day after the Winter Cup, and he cries tears of relief.
Or grief, for all the people he couldn't save.
But this Kuroko Tetsuya, wakes up with dry eyes and a heavy heart.
It's Monday again.
This Monday.
But he's beyond skipping school at this point, and he's well aware of how vital these first few weeks are. They establish the flow of the next few months, determine if there's even a point in leaving his house afterwards. But he has no fear. He knows what variables will not change, and nothing of a catastrophic nature will occur unless he or the dice of chance will it so. But the universe rarely decides to throw anything bigger than an unexpected weather change this early in the game.
Regardless, he always makes sure to kick aside that stray piece of glass in the road. It's not often that that cyclist comes speeding by, and even less so that anything more traumatic than a flat tired occurs; but seeing that kind of accident once was enough.
Thankfully it's not one of those days where a person breathes in a tiny particle of some irritant. And that person sneezes, and that noise startles a cat into darting across a yard with a particularly excitable dog. Which starts barking and wakes up a police officer with troublesome insomnia, who sleepily goes to work and is too groggy to react with their usual speed when they respond to a mugging. Which leads to the victim, who usual gets away with little more than a bruise, bleeding out on the side of the road. The ensuing road closure causes traffic, which causes bus delays and he manages to get to the gym before Mitobe and Koganei in consequence.
No it is not.
Today is one of those blessedly boring days where he gets to school right on time, and signs up for the club, and impresses the team. And, and, and.
It's a bit of a ridiculously complicated story for beating his senpai to the gym, when in all likely hood on that one-time occurrence someone was delayed while the other waited. But he had to entertain himself somehow when he always sees the same faces doing basically the same things every time on This Monday. It becomes less about people watching and more about story writing as he tries to trace further and further back, and guess further and further ahead in their day.
The thing no one ever warns you about with time travel, is that it can get boring. When it isn't stressful, or depressing, or simply maddening. Yet no matter how many times he's experienced these do-overs, the last thing it will ever be is easy.
It's hard to keep track of information, what Kise will likely do if he says X when it's happened 'months' ago. If he's supposed to turn right to stop Y from happening or if that only occurs when Z does, it's all very tiring. Knowing what the end game is doesn't make things easier in the slightest. If he's being sent back to correct a wrong, whatever force that's causing it wouldn't send him back months after he lost his only chance to fix it.
It's obvious that he has to do something at the Winter Cup, and until he does it, he's stuck here. If he simply had to bring Seirin to victory at the tournament, this would have ended ages ago. Most likely, he has to save his friends from themselves. As Momoi once twice, thrice, so on implied, he is probably the only one who can do it.
He's tried everything else, even changing his way of thinking in case he himself was the problem. Thought, 'fuck Akashi, and fuck every one of those assholes,' during a few particularly trying timelines to no avail. He's spent all the time any normal student would have on studying, trying to research his situation, and nothing of use has ever surfaced. Now he just dreams of all the Kuroko's left behind as he pretends to read the assigned chapters of a hefty textbook they were just given; which he's read from cover to cover three times before.
He pities the Kuroko of yesterday, who had inadvertently pushed Akashi to suicide after defeating him in a one-on-one match. Who wakes up to see it's a New Monday, and lives on with guilt and is left wondering if that was what the universe had been holding its breath for. If that was the grand design that had gone awry and had been his sole job to fix. Meanwhile here he is, the supposedly more fortunate Kuroko Tetsuya, who continues reliving This Monday and is able to shake off that unfortunate turn of events like it were a bad dream.
The only thing that stops him from going off the rails completely is the knowledge that each timeline could be his last regardless of what happens. That he could be that Kuroko of yester-year living with the product of thoughtless actions, all because he was drunk with the idea that he was unbound by time and all its consequences. Though his respect for life and all its mysteries doesn't wash away the gnawing fear that he is the one Kuroko Tetsuya who will never turn sixteen.
But he shoves that deep into his pocket of apathy. The same pouch that holds the question of whether or not Akashi's father would be too ashamed about the suicide to hold a proper funeral. And he packs up his things as the bell dictates, and he walks to practice with Kagami, and he hopes that he can change things for the better this time, even if it's not the right answer. And, and, and.
And he hopes that will be enough.